Fall 2016 Graduate Courses

This course prepares graduate students for a successful teaching and learning experience in the foreign language classroom. The course addresses two major goals: introduce aspiring and beginning instructors to the most current methodologies of foreign language teaching and provide them with guidance and practical advice in the classroom. Special focus this semester will be on classroom interaction with its various aspects. The course includes designing lesson plans for a learner-centered classroom, stating objectives based on standards of foreign language learning and nationally accepted proficiency guidelines, finding authentic materials for teaching, developing and reviewing graded assignments, analyzing and comparing different assessment tools, observing and reflecting upon one's own teaching and the teaching by others, and discussing personal experiences and the challenges of the language classroom. This course is taught in German with some assignments and readings in English.

The course explores the research field called "New German Media Theory." German Media Studies has its origins in different disciplines: communication studies, history of art, history of science, sociology, philosophy, and (German) philology. During the last 30 years, a new approach towards media has been developed: They are no longer considered mere instruments or apparatuses for storing and processing information, e.g. to transport data from one place to another or to archive data for future generations. Media instead create the possibility for these operations, and media determine the ways of reading, writing, thinking, and acting. Drawing on these assumptions, Friedrich Kittler wrote in his famous book Grammophone, Film, Typewriter (1986): "Medien bestimmen unsere Lage, die (trotzdem oder deshalb) eine Beschreibung verdient." Since then, theorists have developed different approaches to analyze the technological-medial preconditions of culture.

We will look at a variety of feature films from 1945 to the present in order to focus on issues of guilt, remembrance (and its counterpart: amnesia), gender, Heimat or "homeland," national and transnational self-fashioning, terrorism, trauma, and ethics. How do the Second World War and its legacy inflect these films? What other socio-political and economic factors influence the private and collective identities that these films articulate? How do the predominant concerns shift with the passage of time and with the changing media? How is the category of "nation" constructed and how is it contested within the narratives themselves? Close attention will be paid to the aesthetic issues and the concept of authorship. Films by Kluge, Wenders, Herzog, Fassbinder, Schroeter, Farocki, Haneke, Petzold, Schanelec, Seidl, Hausner, Geyrhalter.

Readings and discussion will be in English; all films are withs subtitles. Readers of German and French are encouraged to read the texts in the original where possible. Advanced undergraduates may take this course with approval of the Undergraduate Director.

Exploration of the work of three German writers who revolutionized modern philosophy, theology, psychology, aesthetics, social and political science, gender studies, historiography, literature, and the arts. We will be reading and discussing a selection of key writings by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, and devoting particular attention to each thinker's theories of value and signification. Along with these we’ll examine a sampling of texts that were important for their work, and writings that later both reflected their influence and drew their ideas in new directions.